Free Chasing Greatness: Johnny Miller, Arnold Palmer, and the Miracle at Oakmont by Adam Lazarus Page A

Player proclaimed with his customary bravado. “I’d like to have three seventy-twos and not even play. That’s how tough the course is.”
    Although the weather for the first day of the 1973 U.S. Open was ideal—low seventies, no wind, sunny—Oakmont kept most of the world’s greatest golfers at bay. Besides 70s by Lee Trevino, Raymond Floyd, and Jim Colbert, no one else besides Player scored a subpar round.
    Given that Player was not expected to be a factor prior to Thursday, the three-stroke difference at the top of the leaderboard startled everyone except, fittingly, Arnold Palmer.
    “What surprises me is not that Gary shot sixty-seven. It’s that no one else could shoot better than seventy,” Palmer candidly observed. “There shouldn’t be so big a gap in there.”
    Player also knew the strength of the field, and to expect that anything could happen during the world’s toughest championship.
    “I remember one U.S. Open in which Arnold Palmer had a seven-stroke lead with nine holes left to play and lost,” Player recalled.
    “You never know what’s in store for you, but the only thing you can do when you’re in this position is go out and try your best. This is the type of golf course [where] it doesn’t matter whether you’re six in front or six behind; you’ve got to keep going. In fact, anybody six behind with one round to go honestly could win it quite easily.”

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    A View from the Parking Lot

    H is whole life, Lee Trevino felt like an outsider.
    As a poor Mexican-American boy, Trevino grew up during the 1940s in the small farm town of Rowlett, northeast of Dallas. He lived with his mother, Juanita, grandfather Joe, and two sisters in a tiny unpainted shack in a desolate hayfield.
    Living without plumbing, electricity, windows, or wallpaper, Lee and his two sisters bathed together twice a week in a metal tub over a wood-burning stove filled with lake water. Joe worked as a gravedigger at Hillcrest Cemetery while Juanita cleaned houses for families in north Dallas. Usually left on his own, young Lee entertained himself when he wasn’t harvesting cotton or sporadically attending school.
    “It was a lonely life,” Trevino recalled. “I was never around anybody. I was all by myself, no one to talk to. I’d just go hunt rabbits and fish.”
    Golf eventually found him. By chance, the Dallas Athletic Club golf course lay just across the street from the dilapidated Trevino home. Though he knew nothing of the rules, Lee learned he could make money off the game. The right side of the seventh fairway caught many wayward tee shots and Lee collected balls, then sold them back to their original owners.
    In that same hayfield, he also found a discarded old club.
    “In those days, if you could afford to play golf, you could afford to throw away clubs,” Trevino said.
    Though the club was left-handed, Lee made do by turning it around and hitting balls with the blade’s tip. Eventually, a second disgruntled Texas golfer tossed another iron—this time a righty—into Trevino’s front lawn, and Lee was on his way.
    The club’s caddie master, “Cryin’ Jesse” Holdman, noticed the enterprising kid hanging around the course selling balls to players and offered him a caddie job.
    “I feel like I helped raise Lee,” Holdman said years later. “Lots of nights when we finished at the club, I’d take a package of cold cuts over to Lee’s old house and have dinner with his family.”
    With nothing but time on his hands as he ditched school and waited for loops across the street, Trevino fashioned a makeshift course out of a nearby pasture and taught himself the game.
    Despite his small size, Trevino showed considerable athleticism in Little League and, when he actually attended school, on the playground. Quickly his raw talent produced easy money.
    “I caddied for one little old man real late on Sundays, and as soon as we got out of sight from the clubhouse he’d let me play him for my caddie